Okay, this is a weird one. Frank Ahearn, an expert in “disappearing” – the art of creating false paper trails and deleting your identity so that you cannot be traced – has written a book and conducted an interview with KiwiFM, a radio station based in New Zealand, on how, exactly, to “fake your death,” or more accurately, to sever all ties to the people who know you – not a literal faking of death. So long as you don’t travel using a fraudulent identity or defraud insurance companies or the like, “disappearing” remains an option for people who believe they have no other option but to start their lives over.

In the following video, the people from TVNZ’s “Close Up” interview Frank. At 1:39, he suggests that you could use disposable memory sticks with this advice:

“Not that I’d ever suggest this, but you could actually wrap it up and stick it in your anus and hide it.”

In fact, Ahearn suggests that the privacy-concerns of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and Google can, in fact, be used as a “double edged sword” – yes, people can use it to track you, but you can also use it to disseminate false information.

With the warning that “your old life and new life must never connect,” Ahearn’s advice is to run to New Zealand, which is an English-speaking country that is far away and has great beaches.

All this is true, of course. New Zealand takes at least 13 hours to reach from LA, it is primarily English speaking, and it does, of course, have beautiful beaches, including the beaches at Mt. Maunganui, which I can tell you from personal experience, are absolutely divine.

However, anyone expecting New Zealand to be technologically remote will find that the country remains just as much a technologically connected society as anywhere else, and in fact, since Kiwis do a great deal of overseas travel, they rely greatly on social networks to keep up with friends overseas and across the country.